Chuc Fondren will never forget the day he anxiously walked out of prison. Incarceration was “terrible,” he says. Now he is focused on moving forward.
“You gotta provide for yourself, you gotta be in there reading books,” he says. “You gotta be in there teaching yourself, working out, getting it together, you know what I’m saying? You can’t expect nobody to get you right.”
Photo fellow Grace Donnelly documented the first steps in his journey back into society.
East Moline Correctional Center, a minimum security prison in western Illinois, houses about 1,000 male inmates.
The large tan building sits perched on a hill near the Mississippi River, located east of downtown.
Chuc Fondren, 27, carries a box of his belongings on the ground floor of the Administration Building where inmates are processed for intake and release. Fondren had just finished serving four years of a seven and a half year sentence in prison for possession of cocaine.
Fondren walks down the driveway of the East Moline Correctional Center on Feb. 23, 2015.
He is headed to the prison’s Gate 1.
When he arrives, he hesitates. He asks the correctional officer who escorted him down the hill, “Sir, Is it okay for me to go?”
Fondren wears the flimsy slip-ons he was issued in prison, thin sweat pants and a sweatshirt. It was 15 degrees that day.
He opens up an envelope containing his “gate money” of $20 received from the Illinois Department of Corrections. His brother later picked him up and drove him home to Peoria.
Fondren takes a deep breath and looks up at the sky minutes after being released from prison.